Anybody got this beast? I ask here because you guys know what a man wants when it comes to noise !

What about the idle noise? Is it audible? Ill be putting it in a Cosmos 1000 case, so thats pretty dampened. Ive got 3 800 rpm GT's running and one 1150 (but this one is airborn, making it sound the same as a 800 on a surface). So the case noise is very low. Would i be hearing it clearly over the other fans at idle?

See my posts in the recomended 5770 card. It's no louder than a Nexus 120mm fan at 7 volts. Not really audible at all in a closed case. I have not been able to load it up enough to make the fan really run - or it is quiet enough to not be noticed.
Steve

Edit just noticed you were looking for a 5870. Maybe they are similar.

The problem as you can see, is the VRM temperatures. You might need a VRM-3 or VRM-4 if you really want to go with the lowest RPM fan, but that's something you'll have to evaluate based on the airflow in your case.

Personally, I think you should just guinea pig the Vapor-X for us and report your results . It's only slightly more expensive than a regular reference 5870, and if you're unhappy with the noise and cooling, you can still replace it with a 3rd party one.

one way to know the noise level is to look at the fan, if it's the same fan as on 5770 vapor-x then it obviously is quiet at idle.

If the vapor-x 58xx has proper VRM cooling it might even be possible to have the fans at 1-10% speed in IDLE?

The way I see it in gaming It's acceptable to have more RPM as gaming needs this and noises are to some extent ignored due to game having audio.

the good thing about aftermarket cooler is that I can plug the fan to a 5.5v/7v resistor and plug into the motherboard VGA fan plug for low noise temperature control, I would assume 200-550rpm with a slipstream 800rpm at 7v(200-550rpm on motherboard volt control).

I think it will be a winner either way though, because if you look at that heatsink you could just remove the shroud and stick a 120mm Nexus on there if it was too noisy. The reported 18C temperature drop compared to the reference card suggests that you could run the fan really, really slowly anyway with RBE.

This is a repost of my post about the HD 5870 Vapor-X as I'd missed this thread.

My backordered Sapphire HD 5870 Vapor-X card finally turned up after a long wait. It's one of the blue PCB second revision models.

I thought I'd get one of these instead of a reference HD 5870 card after reading lots of comments and reviews such as the Bit-Tech one about how quiet and effective the Vapor-X cooler was supposed to be. The card works well apart from one problem - the idle fan speed won't go lower than 1455 RPM which is 22% duty cycle. At this speed the Vapor-X cooler is quite noisy. It's far noisier than my previous Nvidia GTX260 card with the stock cooler (which had the minimum duty cycle lowered to 30% 1,000 RPM approx through Rivatuner). Interestingly, the HD 5870 Vapor-X is about 1cm shorter than the Nvidia GTX260 card. It fit in my (modified) Antec Solo case easily without needing any more metal cutting away from the drive bays.

None of the tuning programs that I've tried (MSI Afterburner, Rivatuner, ATI Catalyst Control Centre) will get the HD 5870 Vapor-X idle fan speed any lower. The duty cycle figure will change to a lower number in GPU-Z but the actual fan speed doesn't change. You can manually increase the fan speed above 1455 RPM however, showing that the fan controller can be controlled through software.

Sapphire HD 5870 Vapor-X idle temperatures and fan speed

Editing the graphics card BIOS doesn't appear to have any effect either. The picture below is of the default fan settings for this card as shown in Radeon BIOS Editor. I've tried flashing it with a lower duty cycle setting and also using the lookup table without any success. The fan speed and displayed duty cycle in GPU-Z remain unchanged.

Sapphire HD 5870 Vapor-X BIOS fan settings

Could anyone suggest how I can get the idle fan speed lower than 1455 RPM through BIOS or software settings please.

If I can't make it run lower then the fan looks fairly standard so I'm thinking about a fan swap for a quieter model.

FWIW, I've just dropped a 5870 Vapor-X into my gaming rig (the P182 rig linked in my sig) to replace my 8800GTX. I've changed some of the case fans as well.

From memory, my 58070 Vapor-X idles at around 1,050rpm at a 21% fan duty cycle according to GPU-Z, although I'm not at home to confirm this at the moment.

I can post pics of my initial idle and load temp testing if anyone wants, once I get home from work.

As for noise, my rig seems just a little noisier on idle (compared to with the 8800GTX with Zalman GV1000 at about 3.5-4V). I also haven't had time to tweak my new case fan set up yet with my new Scythe Kaze Server, so most of the case fans are sitting on around 800rpm (compared to about 500-600rpm when idling previously).

At load, noise levels are much better, however. During the hot days in the local Australian summer, I had to turn up my front intake fan to around 1,000rpm and the GV1000 up to about 8V or 9V (unsure of rpm) to keep temperatures in check.

Hope that helps people in some way. I'll try to get some more tweaking done later in the week, get my case fans working nicely with the Kaze Server's semi-auto mode and post some updated pics of my rig. (My already average cablegami is going to get worse, with all these temperature sensors running everywhere ) If anyone wants to know anything in particular, let me know and I'll try to accommodate any requests.

This is off some, but I have a Powercolor PCS+ 5850, so it's a different cooler and weaker card. At idle it also (acc to GPU-Z) runs at 21%, but the stated fan speed is ~2100, surprisingly high. My case and CPU fans are all undervolted in my Fortress2 and so run between 700 and 900. I find I can't hear the graphics card inside the case, I have to open the case and put my head near the card to hear it, so generically these special coolers can be really quiet (and was so reviewed on the web). I had been hoping actually for the Vapor-X, but they didn't arrive in time for my new build.

So if you, as we all are, quite obsessed with quiet, then perhaps consider the 5850 as reviews also said the Vapor-X was as quiet as the Powercolor PCS+; the reviews also suggest you don't lose much FPS with the 5850 vis-a-vis 5870

Oh, there's as March 15 combined review of PCS+ 5850/5870 in hardocp (I am not allowed to post URLs) showing that at idle at least they seem to share similar noise. I recall an article on both VaporX too (but not both at same time) that compared dbs, but forgot which site it was, they had also done the PCS+ and the dbs were about the same

I have the Powercolor 5870 with the aftermarket cooler, and after downloading MSI Afterburner (free, and is basically RivaTuner with better fan control) I can set my fan to run at 10% for a low, while still ramping up while under load. I'd be surprised if Afterburner wouldn't work for any 5870.

At 10% my card is dead quiet, and even at load this card is much quieter than my old GTX285. The max it gets up to fan-speed wise is around 53%.

If you Google for "hexus powercolor 5870" you will find a nice review of this card.

HardOCP did a review on the same card and noticed much higher power usage than an OEM card, but that isn't a deal breaker for me since it is still quiet & cool running.

The main difference is that the graphics card slot is one place lower down than on the Gigabyte GA-P45-DS4 motherboard I had previously. In order to get the graphics card to fit that meant cutting more of the case away which is why the hole is so big. The pic below shows how much case I've removed. I was expecting a full length HD5870 which is 11" long rather than the smaller HD5870 Vapor-X. Still, the case is "future proofed" now.

Drive bay cut out for fitting long graphics card in Antec Solo case

For the HD5870 Vapor-X fan I'm going to try adding an extension cable with resistor onto the fan power cable to slow the fan speed down. It uses a four pin PWM fan so I've had to order a cable. The original fan cable is pulled tight and very difficult to get at so an extension cable looks like the best option.

I know my Samsung F1 is the noisiest of my drives but happily I have an Antec P182 (and it's not my OS drive, just my Steam games drive) so it's not noticeable in there but that would probably be the last drive I'd want to run externally due to the noise I'd hear (though I use a dock, and not an enclosure for hooking up external drives to my PC on occasion, regardless I'd still rather it be muffled in a case than an enclosure).

Having the hard drive external to the case, mounted in a Growup Japan Smartdrive 2002 enclosure stood on a block of foam, actually works quite well. It has the advantages of freeing up space inside the Antec Solo case, lower hard drive temperatures (10c lower out of the case) and takes a heat source out of the case so the other components don't get as warm.

It's also an improvement noise wise. If you have the enclosure inside the case (mounted in a 5.25" bay) then the vibration from the hard drive is pased onto the case making it quite noticeable. There's not a huge amount of space to suspend a hard drive enclosure in the bottom of the Antec Solo case. With a long graphics card having the drive outside is more practical.

This thread has the parts numbers for the small 4 pin PWM connectors used on graphics cards fans.

hey, I bought this item after hearing many good things about it. I thought I'd add my opinion on it as there wasn't that many people posting their thoughts on it when I was about to upgrade my video card. In the end, I took a chance... if it wasn't quiet enough, I can always get a Twin Turbo Extreme In the end, I am happy with my purchase.

Catalyst Control Center 10.3 doesn't like nvidia card and fails to load until I disable the display that is powered by my nvidia card.

It it tolerable at 3m away, I would describe it as very-quiet, near silent, low-whirring noise.

At idle, default fan speed is 32%, it's the loudest of my system... but still very quiet(near silent) and tolerable when I want a quiet environment. but not dead silent. Seasonic M12D 850W is next loudest part, then fanmate2 connected 18cm case fans of Silverstone FT-02 case.

At 20% fanspeed using ATI CCC, the power supply is louder than the video card fan, @ 3m away, it's virtually inaudible during the daytime.

At idle, default fan speed is 32%, it's the loudest of my system... but still very quiet(near silent) and tolerable when I want a quiet environment. but not dead silent. Seasonic M12D 850W is next loudest part, then fanmate2 connected 18cm case fans of Silverstone FT-02 case.

At 20% fanspeed using ATI CCC, the power supply is louder than the video card fan, @ 3m away, it's virtually inaudible during the daytime.

All opinions are subjective.

What are the reported fan speeds at those duty cycles on your card?

You can check by looking at the "Sensors" tab in GPU-Z which will display the RPM fan speed.

I'm interested to see if my card is the odd one out with its fan speeds or not. JamieG's HD5870 Vapor-X runs at lower fan speeds than my card so there may be some different batches of these cards with varying characteristics.

The official ATI 10.3 catalyst driver is actually a little out of date. You could also try the official 10.3b preview catalyst driver and leaked 10.5 beta catalyst drivers to see if they work better for you. 10.3a preview catalyst and onwards are the ones which are supposed to have the performance enhancements in.

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